A Site on History and Something Else

Archive of entries posted on July 2015

My collection of abstracts and reviews on the USSR in World War II was published this spring (in Russian):

It was printed after the fire at our Institute; luckily the typography has survived. Theoretically, the collection may be ordered here, but it looks like it’s not at stock yet. Some of the materials were prepared by my colleagues from our Department of History.

Initially we were going to show the current situation in historiography, but so many publications have appeared in recent years that we had to limit our work to a relatively small set of the most interesting works standing out for their subjects or research methods. As a result, most of materials in the collection are based on works of Western historians who still much more often use different methodological innovations than their Russian colleagues. Yet there are also abstracts of several Russian books that deal with some insufficiently explored aspects of the history of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. We used almost no works on history of military operations or of the Red Army as, in spite of their importance, they are not so interesting from the viewpoint of methodology. Instead, we devoted special attention to publications that deal with ‘non-military’ subjects, that investigate a human dimension of the Second World War, its long-term consequences and historical context.

As the work at the collection has shown, there was little change in the situation with stocking the library funds by foreign literature in Moscow since I was preparing my previous collection Nachalo Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: sovremennaia istoriografiia [The beginning of the Great Fatherland War: recent historiography]. Even the biggest libraries can only buy rather a few books in comparison with the Soviet period, many books are available only at one of the libraries in one copy. Along with the library of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences, we used books from the Russian State Library (‘Lenin Library’) and the library of the German Historical Institute in Moscow, and also a lot of books, electronic copies of which had been published illegally in the Internet. Piratical libraries continue to collect new literature—luckily for researchers, although to growing displeasure of the publishers’ community which can’t however offer any acceptable alternative. Michael David-Fox (Georgetown University) has brought us a copy of the book The Holocaust in the East that he had edited with Peter Holquist and Alexander Martin. Fortunately, the book was at my colleague’s home when the fire began at the institute. Everything else that had been at our department is at the dump now along with remains of the roof :-(

The contents of the abstract collection:

Foreword

Preddverie i nachalo Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Problemy sovremennoi istoriografii i istochnikovedeniia [The eve and the beginning of the Great Fatherland War: Problems of recent historiography and source criticism] (Abstract)

David M. Glantz about the Red Army in World War II (Joint abstract)

A. B. Orishev, V avguste 1941 [In August 1941] (Abstract)

The Blockade of Leningrad (Joint abstract)

Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Abstract)